Clocked in at 8:07 but paid from 8:00? That is the 7-minute rule at work. Reproduce your employer's rounding exactly and compare it with your real time.
Federal rules (29 CFR §785.48) let employers round punch times to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour (6 minutes), or quarter hour (15 minutes) — provided the rounding is neutral over time, sometimes favouring the employee and sometimes the employer. The famous 7-minute rule is quarter-hour rounding by another name: within each quarter, minutes 0–7 round down and 8–14 round up (so 8:07 AM becomes 8:00, and 8:08 AM becomes 8:15).
The defaults on this page are that exact pair of punches — 8:07 in, 5:08 out — so you can watch one round down and the other round up. Rounding itself is legal; rounding that systematically only benefits the employer is not, and a pattern of one-way differences is what regulators look at. The Hours Calculator also offers these rounding modes for a single shift, and the Time Card Calculator applies them across a whole week.
One shift in, one exact answer out: hours and minutes, decimal hours, break handling, rounding and the gross pay for that shift.
Free — try itBuilt for real punch clocks: up to four in/out pairs in a day — lunch gaps excluded automatically — totalled into paid time and decimal hours.
Free — try itThe classic payroll conversion chart, 1–60 minutes, plus a two-way converter: minutes to decimal hours and decimal hours back to h:mm.
Free — try itThe flagship weekly time card: clock in/out and breaks for 7 days, overtime split at 40 hours, gross pay, print and CSV — plus Save My Week on your device.
Free — try itA way of rounding to the quarter hour: punches at 0–7 minutes past a quarter mark round down to that mark, and punches at 8–14 minutes round up to the next quarter. 8:07 → 8:00; 8:08 → 8:15.
Yes, to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, if the practice is neutral — it must average out so employees are fully paid for all time actually worked over a period.
Rounding may favour either side on a given punch, but a system that consistently rounds only in the employer's favour is not compliant. Keep your own exact records (this page prints both) and raise the pattern with payroll or your state labor agency.
Rounding to the nearest 6 minutes — the marks payroll systems use when they store time in decimal tenths (0.1 hour = 6 minutes). Punches within 3 minutes of a mark round to it.
Rounding moves each punch to a permitted mark before hours are totalled. This calculator rounds your clock-in and clock-out separately using the mode you pick, then subtracts your unpaid break from both the exact shift and the rounded shift, so you can see side by side what the rounding did to that shift — gain, loss, or nothing.
Using the 7-minute rule: you clock in at 7:53 AM and out at 5:09 PM, with a 30-minute unpaid break. The in-punch is 8 minutes past the quarter mark, so it rounds up to 8:00 AM; the out-punch is 9 minutes past the hour, so it rounds up to 5:15 PM. Rounded paid time: 8:45. The exact shift is 8:46 — so on this shift rounding cost exactly 1 minute, which is the difference the page displays.
For punches recorded in whole minutes, they are the same rule in practice. The midpoint of a quarter hour is 7.5 minutes, so “nearest quarter” rounds 0–7 minutes down and 8–14 up — exactly the split the 7-minute rule describes. The two names survive from different payroll traditions, not from different maths.
No. On this page only the two punches are rounded; the break you enter is subtracted as-is from both the exact and the rounded shift, so the difference shown is purely the effect of rounding the punches.
It can, slightly. Rounding happens before a week is totalled, so moving a punch by a few minutes can shift minutes across the 40-hour line in either direction. On the Time Card Calculator on this site you can apply the same rounding modes to a full week and see the split change.
No. This page models neutral rounding — each punch moves to the nearest permitted mark, sometimes up, sometimes down, as the worked example shows (one punch moved 7 minutes later, the other 6 minutes later in your favour). A practice of always rounding in one direction is a different thing; what is permitted is set by law and your employer’s stated policy, and a pattern that always runs against you is worth raising with payroll.
Under the quarter-hour modes, at most 7 minutes — a punch 7 minutes past a mark rounds back to it, and one 8 minutes past jumps 7 minutes forward to the next mark. The 5-minute mode moves a punch by at most 2 minutes, and tenth-of-an-hour rounding by at most 3.
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